264 PART THREE
In this man’s psychic imbalance, off rhymes scrape the ear, however slight:
“jar” / “war,” “minnow” / “window,” “nearer” / “terror,” “shield” / “child,”
plus troublous unrhymed words in every stanza. Like Yeats in “The Stare ’s
Nest by My Window,” from Ireland ’s civil war, Lowell yokes private predica-
ment with public, present with past, nature with history in a casual mode open
to breakdown at any moment.
The clock—an heirloom, maybe from his great-great-uncle James Russell
Lowell, poet and ambassador to England—this ticking time bomb clock along-
side U.N. blather unnerves someone still peering out at the watery world. For
Lowell as father of a four-year-old child, proverbial wisdom’s upset. Hamlet
says art should “hold the mirror up to nature,” and the old saw has it, “One
swallow doesn’t make a summer.” But with Cold War heating up, language
like nature is going askew. At the last minute his inane heirloom gives way to
an oriole ’s nest outside the window, rhyming easily on “rest” and swinging in
nature ’s rhythm.
A year later, symptoms from Lowell’s malaise within the American scene seep
through “The Mouth of the Hudson”—“scuffles... discarded... condemned...
jar... junk... trouble... drifts... wild... blank... puncture... Chemical”
—and all this is seen from a hospital overlooking the river. Here the same spirit
that culls nature to write historical and illness poems, writes these bitter environ-
mental lines.
A single man stands like a bird-watcher,
and scuffles the pepper and salt snow
from a discarded, gray
Westinghouse Electric cable drum.
He cannot discover America by counting
the chains of condemned freight-trains
from thirty states. They jolt and jar
and junk in the siding below him.
He has trouble with his balance.
His eyes drop,
and he drifts with the wild ice
ticking seaward down the Hudson,
like the blank sides of a jig-saw puzzle.
The ice ticks seaward like a clock.
A Negro toasts
wheat-seeds over the coke-fumes
of a punctured barrel.
Chemical air
sweeps in from New Jersey,
and smells of coffee.